


Last Snow

by hellkitty



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-26 00:23:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/959359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the Vladivostok Shatterdome closes down, Sasha and Aleksis are ready for the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kastaka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/gifts).



Siberian weather wasn’t always like this--brutal and blustery and cold, the sky low with faintly falling snow--but it was like it often enough to stir a hollow sort of ache in Sasha’s heart, the kind of not-yet-nostalgia you get when you look at something for what might be the last time.

Foolish, Sasha, she castigated herself, curling her gloved hands on the metal railing. Every time you see the wind-scoured scarps, it could be the last time. Cherno Alpha was tough, one of the toughest jaegers ever built, but even she knew it wasn’t invincible.  

And honestly, she wouldn’t want it any other way: a fair fight, strength against strength. There was a kind of honor in that, the risk, the danger, and she’d fought hard to be one of the elite jaeger pilots to be able to take it.

“Thoughtful,” a voice rumbled, beside her, a moment before Aleksis’s even larger gloved hands appeared next to hers on the railing.  

“Just taking a last look,” she said.  It was truth, or close enough, her eyes scanning as far out as they could, up in the sky this time for the approaching jumphawks. She could hear them in the distance, the rotor-roar a faint ‘whup whup’ from the east.  They didn’t use the huge hauler helicopters in Vladivostok’s Shatterdome, only to move immobilized jaegers, like when Eden Assassin had been picked up for its drop to Oblivion Bay.

Aleksis grunted, his pale eyes scanning the sky just as hers did, looking for the jumphawks. It was the resonance of the Drift, she thought, that they were so in sync with each other.  He probably knew the emotion under her words, despite her flat tone.

“You always did want to travel,” he said. He was never as good as she was at sucking the tone from his voice. She could hear the rumble of suppressed laughter in his chest, even as he spoke. His idea of a joke: she never wanted to travel, at least not outside the Soviet Union. Why would she?  Everything she could possibly want was right here: the cold steppes, the glittering Volga, little dachas dotting the banks, the bustle of cities, summer, bursting into flower; winter, with ice so white it was blue.  It was the whole world to Sasha, everything she wanted to protect.  She felt a fierce pride, almost a burning in her veins, that she, of all the candidates, had been the one chosen of all of them to pilot the huge jaegers, to protect them from the kaiju.

She shot Aleksis a look, cutting and cold as the Vladivostok winter, and the rumbling laugh burst out of him.

“Too easy to rile you up, golubushka,” he said, nudging her with one shoulder. And old joke between them.

She bumped back, the only sign of returned affection she let herself show.  Aleksis knew her well enough not to need more from her. Besides, there was always the Drift, where she could hide nothing from him.  

The Jumphawks hove into view, finally, little dark spots, in perfect tight formation, materializing from the low clouds of the winter sky.  “I just wish we had outlasted the Americans.”

Aleksis nodded: the Los Angeles Shatterdome was one of three still funded. And they? They were getting sent to Hong Kong. “Still, we have a chance to go out fighting like true Russians.”

She nodded, stepping back from the railing, the wolverine fur of her coat’s collar soft against her cheek as she turned to look at Cherny. Cherno Alpha, the others called it, but it would always be Cherny to her: dark and sturdy and brutal, one of the oldest of the jaegers, with the highest kill count: a testament to Russian engineering.  American jaegers might be sleeker, prettier, but, well, that was America. All flash and speed.  She wouldn’t pilot one of their jaegers if she had to. Not while Cherny was operational.

Aleksis turned, looking back with her. “You remember?”

“The first time we saw her.” She nodded.  It had been after their Drift trial: she remmbered the long walk, the huge robot looming bigger and bigger with every step she took toward it, until she couldn't see the top even with her head tilted as far back as it would go. Huge and massive and...theirs.  It had been love at first sight, as Americans would have it, but Sasha thought of it more as the jaeger being in tune with her almost like an outward expression of what she was: fearless, powerful, competent.

“I was thinking of our first Drift in her.”

“Always the romantic, Aleksis,” she said, but the burred edge was off her voice. No one was nearby, the crew all gathered around Cherno Alpha, locking its limbs to prepare it for its journey.  They--the pilots--had nothing to do right now. Normally they would have been right in there: they knew every centimeter of Cherny’s systems, inside and out, but the order had come down from the base commander that they had to make an impression. Hence she and Aleksis, in their dress uniforms and coats, while the crew still worked in oil-spotted coveralls.  Sasha didn’t mind spectacle and she didn’t even mind wanting to make an impression on the Westerners taking them to the Hong Kong shatterdome, but she did mind missing out on working on her jaeger.  

But her thoughts couldn’t help but follow Aleksis’s--something about endings always calling up their beginnings, she thought, like circles closing neatly together, like an ouroboros.  

~~~~~~~

“This isn’t like the simulation,” Aleksis said, watching Sasha attach the couplings to the arms of her drivesuit.  Only she didn’t think of him as Aleksis back then: he was huge, the biggest man she’d ever seen, a foot taller than even her tall height, a stranger from another training class. She found out later he'd gone through the PPDC training, too, coming back with a healthy dislike of Western culture but a love and drive for the jaegers as great as hers.

“I can handle it,” Sasha said, trying to force down the tremble in her belly. It didn’t help that she knew that in a few moments, once the neural handshake was engaged, she wouldn’t be able to hide anything, especially nothing so obvious as emotion.  She said it because it was reflex, defense; but also because so far, she hadn’t met anything she couldn’t handle.

“We will see,” he said, tipping his helmet down sharply, the visor snapping down, blocking his face from view.  

At least he sounded like he’d give her a chance: even in simulation she’d run across male jaeger pilots who had...issues with the ideas of women as competition.  The Soviet rules were absolutely gender blind, but she’d found that the inside of men’s minds were harder to equalize.  She’d been through enough bad simulations, mind barraged by hate, by memories/fantasies of degradation and abuse, almost thrown at her like ‘this is what I’d do to you’. And she’d handled those, she thought, brusquely, snapping her own visor down.  She could handle any of it, because she wanted this more than she cared about what anyone thought of her.  

The countdown to the neural handshake was that line between tedium--the scripted checklist she’d already done dozens of times in sims and hundreds in her head, mentally practicing the steps, making them rote, automatic--and stressful, knowing that this one, this one counted. A real Drift in an actual jaeger--her jaeger to lose if she messed this up, if the handshake didn’t take. This was it: what she had been training for, what she wanted more than anything.

Major Ibragimov was watching--she could hear his voice murmuring behind the flat monotone of the technician.  He expected her to fail: he expected all of them to fail, it seemed. His last words echoed in her mind as she watched the screens flick through the automatic checks of the jaeger’s systems. For real this time, not a canned sim.  

He’d strode in front of the line of candidates, reminding them that there were only three slots open, for all of them. Only three, and the rest of them would be shunted to reserve. “And,” he’d said, turning on his polished boot’s heel at the end of the line, “three. At most.  Maybe all of you will be reserves. We would rather leave the jaegers unpiloted than give them over to someone unworthy of the honor.”  

He’d stopped before Leonov, next to Sasha: a thick plug of a man, the kind whose neck was just a sharp slope into his shoulders, the ear closest to Sasha lumpy with scars. The major tilted his head down, light glossing off the visor of his helm. “You think you are tough.” He lifted his head from Leonov to the others down the line, without waiting for an answer. “You think because you have survived our physical training, that you are tough. You are physically tough. You may even think you are mentally tough, because you had the will to keep going.” He gave a rueful smile. “That will not help you in the Drift.”

No. She was tough, she knew she was tough. She could do this. She knew she could.  

He’d stepped back, as the technicians stepped forward with the gear, the drivesuits. For most of the fifteen men and women here, those who had outlasted the training, it would be their only time in one.  “Remember your training,” he said, like it was a riddle, a joke only he understood.  

They were all thinking the same thing, as his bootheels clicked past them, his job done, the months of his constant presence, needling, yelling, over. Just like that. He was done, washed his hands of them.

The countdown scrolled in front of her, down, down to what English called ‘the moment of truth’.  Literally, here, she thought.

And that was the last thought she had, before she felt the Drift.

It was like falling, that sort of stomach-lifting pull, and she’d felt her hands clench, even in the pilot suit, but it was a distant feeling, her mind, herself, somewhere else.

Somewhere--she knew where. She knew this place, the awful stench, so thick it seemed to clog the air in her nose: blood and shit and offal and rot, metallic and vile. And she could feel the wetness, cold and slimy, repugnant, soaking through the fabric of her trousers, slipping clammy fingers down her socks into her boots.

And the dogs. She could hear them, see them as flashes of white teeth under snarling muzzles, curled lips, mouths that spoke of mindless hunger, violence, as they broke from their leashes, paws slapping against the concrete.

This is a test, Sasha thought, a test of fear. They want to know I’m not afraid.  Dogs are not kaiju, but if you run from a dog, you won't stand and fight one of the otherworldly monsters. And she’d turned to face the dogs, even as the others behind her broke, and ran, deeper and deeper into the room filled with entrails, up to their waists, shoulders, blood and slime flailing off their limbs.  

She felt a slip, suddenly, a foot catching on something--a kidney, a collapsing lung, and then the gagging revulsion of the taste of it in her throat.

...but that wasn’t her, that hadn’t happened to her.  

She looked over, and heard a grunt of acknowledgment.  This was his memory of the room of blood, not hers. And she could feel her/his heartbeat, hammering against his chest, and she could feel the thought, the churning disappointment even in Aleksis, in the moment, back then, that he had broken, had done something wrong, joining the mass panic pressing through the vile room, blood and guts on his face, shoulders, sliming down the back of his neck like misery made manifest.

And she could feel him feel her memory, the hot tear of the dog’s teeth on her forearm, her own blood, hot and more real to her than any of the horror of this room, and the blaze of pain, and her own voice, breaking into a shriek, as her other hand went in, under the jaw, in a hard chop for the dog’s throat. And Ibramigov, standing on an observation ledge, yelling, “Oyobuk!”

Remember your training, she thought, with bitter amusement, wondering if this is what Ibragimov had meant, even as the memory slipped into the past, and she heard the bland voice of the technician report, “Neural handshake holding, 100% synch.”  

~~~~~~

The Jumphawks had landed, and crews had rushed out to them, to refuel, resupply the heavy helicopters for the long ride and heavy load of Cherno Alpha, one of the few Mark I’s still in service. And a fifth copter had landed, one with the PPDC logo still gleaming new, even in the cloudy dim light of Siberian day.  They watched as the door opened, and Marshal Pentecost stepped out, as formally dressed as they were. She recognized him from the one day he'd spoken to them, all those years ago, over a network transmission: fifty hopeful pilot candidates in the special training the Russians held to themselves. No Jaeger Academy for them: they could do their own training, took a stubborn, obstinate, _Russian_ pride in their own rigor.

A flurry of snow blew by, big flakes of white, the clumpy fall of a first snowfall, the wind that carried it slipping around the collar of Sasha’s coat like a cold knife.

“Time to meet our new CO,” Aleksis said, using the English abbreviation, one of his view concessions to the new mission. And his hand rested--just for a moment--on her sleeved forearm, where they could both feel the old burn of those dog-tooth scars, a reminder of their past that meant more to her than their shared names, a bond deeper than marriage or training that no one who'd never Drifted could not understand,  as they stepped toward their future, still fighting, still together.

**Author's Note:**

> The blood room is at least an apocryphal bit of Spetsnaz training: guts and offal are gathered from a nearby slaughterhouse and dumped in a basement-type room as hungry dogs are let loose on the candidates. It's to test if they can overcome their revulsion/shock at the blood. 
> 
> Oyobuk is a very not PC word: Ibramigov is not PC. He does, however, not gender it.


End file.
